A Mageia spokesperson told iTWire, in response to an inquiry, that there was a plan to include it as a discussion point when planning features for version 4.

At that point, "we will decide then how we will deal with it," the spokesperson said.

Secure boot is a feature of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface that has replaced the BIOS.

Microsoft has implemented it and made it compulsory for any hardware that needs to be certified for Windows 8. During the boot process, there is an exchange of cryptographic keys to ensure that the kernel being booted is indeed what it claims to be.

As a result, any GNU/Linux distribution that wants to have a bootable CD or DVD for such hardware will need to support secure boot.

Red Hat's Fedora project and Ubuntu have released images that support secure boot. But there are other issues with these releases which prevent straightforward installation on secure boot-enabled systems.

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A professional journalist with decades of experience, Sam for nine years used DOS and then Windows, which led him to start experimenting with GNU/Linux in 1998. Since then he has written widely about the use of both free and open source software, and the people behind the code. His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.